this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
206 points (99.5% liked)
Games
20323 readers
82 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
'But arcades!' Are renting someone else's hardware. Different thing. This did abuse not exist fifteen years ago.
'But free games!' Can just be free. Or pay-what-you-want. Or cheap. Or something you already own. How's your back catalog on Steam?
This Skinner-box horseshit where a game is """free""" but somehow makes a billion dollars is weaponized frustration. The handful of games that were re-released with tiny updates at full price are now the entire industry's goal, thanks to this specific abuse. (And they still got you chumps to buy three 3D versions of Street Fighter.)
You can pay the price of a whole-ass game for a hat.
Lesser versions of that aren't better, just lesser. The opportunity to spend one hundred dollars right the hell now is shoved in your face between rounds. Or dangled each time a lootbox animation juuust misses. Or crammed into your inventory, as a gift, mmyes, if only you bought a key.
If LoL wants to keep making money they can charge a subscription or sell expansions. Y'know - rational consumer purchasing decisions. Not playing keep-away and then tickling people's balls in a controlled environment where fireworks go off each time you click Confirm Purchase.
Inevitably: 'but people don't often go for subscriptions.' Yeah! It's almost like conscious choices are less generous than engineered decisions! Or: 'but budgets rely on that immense revenue!' Then they should shrink. Budgets follow revenue. Always always always. Whatever money these fuckers spent, they expect to extract from you, three times over.
Wait, in what world is a subscription a "rational consumer purchasing decision" where buying characters for a fighting game if you want them as they come out is not?
I would prefer to pay for in-game content of any kind, cosmetics included, over paying a subscription for a game. Any day. Especially if the content is characters, as is the case in LoL or Street Fighter.
And yeah, I bought three 3D Street Fighter games. And a bunch of characters for each. Even a costume or two. I am extremely on board with that. Money extremely well spent, as far as I'm concerned.
Hell, the SF6 community at the moment is begging for more cosmetics. They just announced a handful of horny-ass swimsuit costumes and people went ballistic. It's not my bag, but if people like them and they know what they're buying who the hell are you to tell them they're wrong, let alone that it should be illegal?
I mean, it's a straightforward enough transaction. You think bikini Cammy with tan lines is hot and will pay some money for that skin. I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like. Win/win in my book.
That's the problem with this train of thought. There's some stuff where you and I agree there are bad practices and we can probably agree on some common sense regulation for them. But if you're going to come at me with a maximalist approach that boils down to "games I don't like shouldn't exist" we're going to disagree.
Which, if nothing else, is a good reason for regulation of creative products to be relatively loose whenever possible. I was not on board with Hillary wanting to ban Mortal Kombat in the 90s because she didn't like hearts being ripped out and I'm not on board with people wanting to ban free to play games now. It made sense to have age ratings in the 90s and it makes sense to have that and other common sense regulations now.
None of this is ever about the game part of the game. Fuck entirely off with pearl-clutching over content. This is about a business model. I want people to sell the most addictive, transgressive, customizable bullshit you can imagine, so long as it is either a product or a service. Like anything else you buy. Imaginary shit inside a video game is neither.
You can insist, 'but it's new!,' except it's already in your game. You're looking at it, on someone else's character. This is a dividing line where Oblivion's infamous horse armor is completely above-board. It was a hundred kilobytes of not much, but it was unambiguously an expansion. You, the human being, received a file you did not have before. Not just permission to say your guy had what anyone else could already wear.
This business model reduces the game part of the game to bait on this hook. Whatever people want, or can be made to want, is dangled at ten bucks a pop, fifty items at a time. Eough rubes get gouged for hundreds or thousands of dollars, such that the total revenue exceeds what the studio would get, even if they sold everybody the full-price game three separate times.
I care about those victims. You delight in their exploitation.
Nothing short of banning the abuse would work. We're talking about game designers. Manipulating people into enjoying certain behaviors is literally their job. People finally recognized lootboxes are bad - so they sold gave away the boxes and sold keys. Or sold gems. Or insisted it's just cosmetics. Or-- none of it's fucking different! It's all the same shit! You're all being dragged against the grindstone, using the same tricks that make games fun in the first place. The whole product is an excuse to keep grinding away at you until you decide to open your wallet and look away.
If you want to say that certain types of business models, like paying for RNG where you don't know what you're buying, are predatory, I would be with you on that.
But your extreme hardline stance of "nothing should cost money ever" is not a reasonable place to draw the line. At least some of what you're railing against should be perfectly fine.
Nothing inside a video game. That part is not optional. I've dealt with too many cranks who see me arguing - JUST SELL GAMES - and then go 'you want it for free!' No, folks, you want it for free. You want to play endlessly-updated games, 'subsidized by teenage hormones.' You imagine that you would never be taken for ungodly sums of money.
Even if you're right, you're counting on other people being taken for all the money you're not paying, and more. That's what it means, when this abuse makes more money.
Predatory abuse is inseparable from this business model. Maximum revenue comes from addiction and frustration. You can be made to want whatever bullshit they're allowed to push. That's how games work. They mechanically convince you to value arbitrary nonsense.
edit: oh shit, I thought I hit submit on this five hours ago.
I do want updated games, yes. My favorite games wouldn't be my favorite games if 1.0 was all we ever got.
Some games have predatory models, and I do oppose that. But only when it actually is predatory. I take issue with how you're trying to say nothing should ever be sold, even when what's being sold is perfectly fair.
I take issue with how you're still lying about what I said. 'Things being sold' is my entire drive. Did you miss it, in all caps? The problem is this farce of charging real money for permission to use what's already in a game you already paid for.
Games were updated before this nonsense was possible. This business model is only like fifteen years old. Unreal Tournament '99 had updates and new content for years, because people kept buying the game.
I'm not missing, I'm saying that your hardline stance against things being sold isn't reasonable.
You're repeatedly misrepresenting my stance after several clear and specific corrections.
You said "Nothing inside a video game should cost real money". Those are your words. If you want to claim that your stance is actually something else, why did you say those words?
And you keep pretending I said "nothing should ever be sold." Or “nothing should cost money ever.”
Do you need a diagram?
If nothing costs money, nothing is sold. Are you trying to play dumb here?
I'd sound less hostile if you didn't need this explained five separate times.
And it's not incidental, because you are now that crank, insisting "you don’t seem to want anyone to get paid to make [content]."
Stop fucking that strawman.
I know what you said, and I know we're on the same page because we've been talking about concrete examples where you say the DLC shouldn't be allowed to be sold. I don't know why you're up here trying to play some silly semantics games.
The DLC is content in the video game.
That's why you can see it, even if you haven't paid for it.
Welcome to the conversation.
For the love of god, do not make me rub your nose in this a seventh time.
Yes, I know how DLC works. And I disagree with your blanket opposition to all DLC ever.
Horse armor was above-board, relative to this.
I keep telling you the precise shape of the problem, and you keep going 'yeah, something else.'
I'm done playing your weird word games. We've been talking about a concrete example, one where you say this example is pReDaToRy simply because it involves DLC, and I take issue with you drawing that line. You can't pretend you're actually saying something else at the same time.
I have repeatedly, specifically, and explicitly pointed out this is a lie.
You don't care.
You don't get to sneer about a word choice I've told you over and over that I did not use, in the context you're sneering about.